A group of slaves band together to escape from their 1857 Georgia plantation in a new drama series premiering this week on WGN America.
The hourlong "Underground," debuting Wednesday (March 9), tells the story of a cadre of revolutionaries of the Underground Railroad, who call on reserves of courage, strength, ingenuity and perseverance to pull off one of the greatest escapes in history despite the odds and consequences they faced.
Chief among them is Noah (Aldis Hodge, "Straight Outta Compton," "Turn"), a courageous blacksmith who organizes the escape; Rosalee (Jurnee Smollett-Bell, "The Great Debaters," "True Blood"), a shy and sheltered house slave who must call upon courage she never knew she had; Zeke (Theodus Crane, "The Walking Dead"), a slave of enormous size and strength; and Moses (Mykelti Williamson, "Justified," "24"), a fiery preacher who struggles with what God might think of their plan.
Also in the cast are Alano Miller ("Jane the Virgin") as Cato, a cunning and charismatic slave driver; Reed Diamond ("Moneyball") as plantation owner Tom Macon; Christopher Meloni ("Law & Order: SVU," "42") as August Pullman, an itinerant man with a secret; and Marc Blucas ("Blue Bloods") and Jessica De Gouw ("Arrow," "Dracula") as John and Elizabeth Hawkes, an abolitionist lawyer and his socialite wife.
The series was filmed near Baton Rouge, La., on a plantation where slaves were kept in the 19th century, a setting that helped the actors get into the time and their characters' mind-sets.
"You can't help but have feelings once you're there and kind of feel the echoes, feel the ghosts of the past," Meloni says. "Everywhere they placed us had meaning. … They were set up in bare-minimum living standards, and that's not the worst of it. They were forced to just stay in an unrealized state, which is a place of no hope, a place where there are no dreams. You know, this is where you are, what you are and where you'll stay. … This was it, until the master sells you somewhere else."
For Smollett-Bell and Hodge, a whipping scene in the premiere episode involving Rosalee had particular resonance.
"The second you hear that whip crack," Smollett-Bell says, "the sound of that, even though I wasn't physically really being whipped, there's something about doing it underneath the tree on the actual plantation. And this tree, I just kept looking up at it and I heard the Billie Holiday song 'Strange Fruit' because I just kept thinking about what that tree had seen and witnessed. And the spirit just takes over you. You know, you just let it, and it really overpowered me."
"She had to re-enact that in a place where this really did happen," Hodge adds, "and when you go there you just soak up all of the energy of the land and it's hard to escape it. … I mean, I had to sit there and watch the scene and it was hard for me.
"You know, we just all had little moments of solace afterward," he continues, "after the whole scene was done just to kind of take a break, decompress."
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